In many cases, you get a misleading view of an artist’s work if you remove it from the context of their development over their career. This is most apparent in the late nineteenth century, where so many painters worked in academic style as students, and progressed through several other... Read more

It’s commonly thought that the last time that Britain was invaded was by the Normans in 1066. In fact it was by an American Colonel in 1797 on behalf of Napoleon. He landed at Fishguard in Wales, and survived three days before surrendering his forces. That same year, when... Read more

Having set the scene with Velázquez’s unusual painting of a young woman who could be a sibyl, or an allegory of painting, I come to look in detail at his Las Hilanderas, which he painted for an unknown patron before he travelled to Italy for his second visit. Before... Read more

Late in Velázquez’s career, when his position at court was very close to King Philip IV, he painted two of his finest, most important, and most enigmatic works: Las Hilanderas (The Spinners), and Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour). Before considering these, I will look at an earlier enigma... Read more

Following the return of Velázquez from his first visit to Italy, by early 1631, it was time to get on with his court duties. Over the next fifteen years, he and his workshop produced a great many portraits, of Philip IV, his relatives and aides, of court jesters and... Read more

During the 1800s, history, and other forms of narrative, painting underwent a crisis from which they have never really recovered. This article looks at the narrative paintings of Gustave Moreau, who rethought the genre. Although now an obscure artist, the paintings which I consider here are of great importance... Read more

Largely forgotten until revived recently, Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) was the most popular painter of the Salon and the art market during the period that the Impressionists were active, and rejecting the Salon. A realist whose style has been dubbed Néo-Grec (Neo-Greek), many of his most popular works showed scenes... Read more

Time is the warp through which we weave narrative. Though we can directly visualise most other elements within a narrative, we cannot see time, and can only represent it indirectly in the form of a timeline, against which we can place the events which together compose the narrative. A... Read more

The first and simplest of the apps which I have used for creating media-rich timelines is Timeline 3D, which I briefly covered earlier. Free from the Mac App Store, you need to make in-store purchases to enable its rich export features. Unless you are on a very tight budget,... Read more

The second app which I have used to create timelines with is Aeon Timeline, at £29.99 one of the Mac App Store’s middleweights. Whereas Timeline 3D exports similarly laid-out timelines in a rich range of formats, Aeon Timeline has a huge range of features and controls to vary structure... Read more